Just finished Chapter 4. So far, a very enjoyable read and a great and much needed refresher! In the first sentence of chapter 1 where you said, "I think of my photographic collection as a living thing - a body of work, if you will", it made me stop and think for a moment. Taking that perspective or view, gives a whole new meaning to one's photography, and a whole new significance to DAM. It's motivated me to give a little more time and attention of my archive, and I think it's even inspired me to keep it growing over time, by adding more and interesting snippets of life to it. As my archive ages, its meaning grows. It truly is a part of me. I think that was a great way to start the book.

Now for a few questions from the first few chapters. My apologies if some of these have already been answered on the forum.

1) Do you know if Microsoft has any plans to harvest ACR adjustments in EM?

2) You talked about OutTakes, but do you see any real advantages to pruning the archive? If so, do you also prune the backup?

3) With the new DNG 1.2 spec and it's support of a data validation hash (among other things), do you recommend re-converting all your DNG's in your arcive.

4) Any software yet using the 2008 IPTC extensions (what about IIP?)? Can I see these with Bridge, including my PLUS ID's?

5) Getting nit picky: Just curious why you use RAWBLU to name your Originals folders instead of something like ORIGBLU seeing as RAW is just one form of original?

Hope that isn't too many to make you tilt ;-).

By the way 20GB x 1000 = 20 Terabytes, not 20 Petabytes (p. 146) ;-).

Also, your photographs really add allot to the enjoyment of the book. They serve as proof that it's possible to become an expert in DAM and still take good photos (I mean 'great' photos ;-)). So to that I say, no photographer has an excuse..... learn DAM!

Looking forward to the rest of the book, with, I'm sure, more questions to come.

On a side note - I do feel guilty for not having helped answer questions on the forum lately. I guess I've just allowed DAM to slip away from me as I've been persuing my commercial business and of course keeping my day job secure during this recession. I am looking forward though to getting back into gear with DAM and doing what I can to help out where possible.

There's no question you've outdone yourself with this new book. Thanks again for another remarkable contribution to the field. It's bringing back some great memories for me already and rekindling the passion, and to that extent, it's worth it's weight in gold. Wish I could be there on the 16th. Be sure to send me some of that Jambalaya ;-).

>1) Do you know if Microsoft has any plans to harvest ACR adjustments in EM?

Can't comment one way another. I do think *all* XMP should be harvested by one's DAM application.

>2) You talked about OutTakes, but do you see any real advantages to pruning the archive? If so, do you also prune the backup?No, I don't prune. I might one day. Remember the exposure brackets. Clearly trash several years ago - now you might really wish you had them for HDR.

>3) With the new DNG 1.2 spec and it's support of a data validation hash (among other things), do you recommend re-converting all your DNG's in your arcive.

At the point you are doing some other migration, yes.

>4) Any software yet using the 2008 IPTC extensions (what about IIP?)? Can I see these with Bridge, including my PLUS ID's?

Nope, still vaporware. We should see a Bridge/Photoshop extension soon, I'm told by the IPTC people.

> 5) Getting nit picky: Just curious why you use RAWBLU to name your Originals folders instead of something like ORIGBLU seeing as RAW is just one form of original?

totally arbitrary. (One slightly not arbitrary thing - the old originals were called RAW_001, RAWBLU_001 lines up after them as I was doing the conversion in stages.

>Hope that isn't too many to make you tilt ;-).

Nope.

>By the way 20GB x 1000 = 1 Terabyte, not one Petabyte (p. 146) ;-).

Crap, you're right- 20 TB. First mistake caught, you win a prize. Don't know what it is yet.

>Also, your photographs really add allot to the enjoyment of the book. They serve as proof that it's possible to become an expert in DAM and still take good photos (I mean 'great' photos ;-)). So to that I say, no photographer has an excuse..... learn DAM!

Thanks. I was pleased with a number of them.

>Looking forward to the rest of the book, with, I'm sure, more questions to come.

Bring it on.

>On a side note - I do feel guilty for not having helped answer questions on the forum lately. I guess I've just allowed DAM to slip away from me as I've been persuing my commercial business and of course keeping my day job secure during this recession. I am looking forward though to getting back into gear with DAM and doing what I can to help out where possible.

Dan, no apologies necessary. I appreciate your help with member approval enormously.

>There's no question you've outdone yourself with this new book. Thanks again for another remarkable contribution to the field. It's bringing back some great memories for me already and rekindling the passion, and to that extent, it's worth it's weight in gold. Wish I could be there on the 16th. Be sure to send me some of that Jambalaya ;-).

Funny, I'm drinking one of those right now. (Danish heritage, and all that.) So this one is the Dan Altick honorary Carlsberg. (Don't tell Beardsworth, he like that flat brew from the middle ages known as Real Ale)Peter

Be aware, though, that IPTC says that they plan to release an updated specification next month that will change a couple of the field names in the Extensions section. They had misspelled "ProviceState" which affects the two extended location fields (LocationShown and LocationCreated), and they will be correcting the spelling to "ProvinceState". Also, they have decided that the field name "DigitalSourcefileType" was misleading and are planning to rename it "DigitalSourceType". Use those fields with caution.

Just finished chapter 5; another very informative chapter. Lots of good info.

I guess the only area that I might question are the benefits of your server versus a tower server.

The advantages you cite are: smaller footprint, better processing power, less electrical power draw, lower cost, and less heat generation. I might be inclined to debate all of those. My watercooled tower is pretty compact for a tower, and my processors are upgradeable, I don't think you could build it any cheaper than I have. It has SMART data reporting, SATA speed, and even doubles as my workstation with internal working files folders. My 120mm dual-fan radiator and water-pump sit outside the enclosure on a cold concrete floor above a crawl space. The tower has twelve drive bays including a hot-swappable SATA bay for offsite backups. A couple of drawbacks I do see here though: It's not remotely located - It sits under my desk in my office. It also only has one hot-swappable drive bay, but that can easily be expanded, or replaced with an eSATA caddie.

If you were to try to use my system for your needs, where would it fall short? That might help me get a better understanding. Thanks.

Moving on to Chapter 6. Allot of good info in this chapter. Having to read it fairly carefully to decipher it all. Peter, I'm amazed at your thoroughness of the topic of backups. I will try to do a little comparing and contrasting when I'm done. Stay tuned ;-).

My watercooled tower is pretty compact for a tower, and my processors are upgradeable, I don't think you could build it any cheaper than I have. It has SMART data reporting, SATA speed, and even doubles as my workstation with internal working files folders. My 120mm dual-fan radiator and water-pump sit outside the enclosure on a cold concrete floor above a crawl space. The tower has twelve drive bays including a hot-swappable SATA bay for offsite backups. A couple of drawbacks I do see here though: It's not remotely located - It sits under my desk in my office. It also only has one hot-swappable drive bay, but that can easily be expanded, or replaced with an eSATA caddie.

Dan, is there a place where you have described the details of building such a system?

Finally finished Chapter 6: Backing Up and Validating Data. I learned some new terms: 3-2-1 rule, M+I (Mirror + incremental), Additive Backups, Swappers, Virgin Download, and DIY Collocation. All in all a great chapter. I think you did a great job of drilling home all the different types of threats that exist. I realize now I really need to start validating my data transfers and using a set of swapper drives for my Working Files. I also need to start periodically burning my catalogs to write-once media.

The different backup configurations was very helpful as well. I think I will cite my own backup configuration for comparison:

Instead of a client/server configuration with the online Working Files backup on the server, I basically have a single tower imaging workstation/server along with two additional general purpose PC's on a LAN. My primary Working Files and Archive reside on the imaging workstation. The primary Archive gets backed up via the Additive 3-2-1 rule. The Working Files will soon get mirrored with SyncBack My online Working Files backup resides on one of the general purpose computers. I image the System/Programs/User Folders of each PC to online and offsite drives periodically using compressed Acronis images. My catalogs are on my imaging workstation's C partition so they get imaged along with this. For the PC at least, I prefer compressed images. They use less disk space, I can keep several copies going back in time, and can browse and mount them as drive letters in Windows Explorer. They also get purged after a few months, so no compatibility concerns with long term archival. I've also found that I can't clone multiple PC's with Acronis to a single offsite drive. It forces me to delete the existing partitions on the drive; however, I can put multiple compressed images on a single offsite drive.

Instead of supplementing this with an M+I, I use DIY Collocation with CrashPlan for my System/Programs/User Folders (in the book you mentioned using it for the archive). The PCs' backup via CrashPlan to both onsite and offsite locations. CrashPlan also handles backing up and versioning of my catalogs. I'm under the assumption that CrashPlan handles the versioning by only backing up the pieces of the catalogs that change.

For in-the-field laptops I would definitely agree with bootable cloning of the boot drive. They are more mission critical. I think if I were operating at a scale where I needed mission critical of my System/Programs/User Files in my office/studio, I would probably use a RAID setup. As it stands currently, if I lose one of my system hard drives, I would have to put in a new one along with the Acronis boot CD and copy the latest image to the new drive. This would take a little extra time over being able to boot directly from a cloned drive, but given my situation I think the benefits outweigh the costs.

If you see any fundamental problems with this approach, please let me know.

All in all, this chapter was a great addition to the book, including the Data Validation section at the end. I'm looking forward to cataloging software supporting DNG validation. It also reminded me that I need to start using Image Verifier periodically on my archive.